Friday, August 19, 2016

NASA's Cassini Spacecraft Finds Flooded Canyons on Titan!

The
newfound Titan canyons are up to 1,870 feet (570 meters) deep and feature
slopes that are at least 40 degrees steep, though they're fairly narrow, with
maximum widths of around 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers), researchers said.

The new
discovery further cements the intriguing similarity between Earth and Titan,
the only two worlds in the solar system that are known to harbor stable liquid
on their surfaces. (Titan also has a thick atmosphere dominated by nitrogen, as
does Earth.)

"Earth
is warm and rocky, with rivers of water, while Titan is cold and icy, with
rivers of methane. And yet it's remarkable that we find such similar features
on both worlds," study co-author Alex Hayes, a Cassini radar team associate
at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said in a statement.

The study
team, led by Valerio Poggiali of the University of Rome, analyzed radar images
of Titan captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during a close flyby of the
3,200-mile-wide (5,000 km) moon in May 2013.

The imagery
focused on a channel system that drains into Ligeia Mare, a huge hydrocarbon
sea near Titan's North Pole. Scientists had thought that some of these canyons
might contain liquid, and the newly analyzed images confirm that suspicion,
showing a "glint" characteristic of very smooth surfaces.

Cassini
also used its radar instrument as an altimeter during the May 2013 pass,
allowing Poggiali and his colleagues to measure canyon depths. These ranged
from 790 feet (240 m) all the way up to 1,870 feet (570 m) — the deepest ever
measured on Titan, researchers said.

The canyons
were probably carved by uplift of the landscape, changes in sea level or a
combination of these two factors (both of which occur here on Earth as well), team
members said.

"It's
likely that a combination of these forces contributed to the formation of the
deep canyons, but at present it's not clear to what degree each was
involved," Poggiali said in the same statement. "What is clear is
that any description of Titan's geological evolution needs to be able to
explain how the canyons got there."

Researchers
plan to characterize the other canyons Cassini has probed via radar altimetry
during its close Titan flybys over the years. Such work could lead to a better
understanding of the processes that have shaped Titan's landscape, NASA
officials said.

The $3.2
billion Cassini-Huygens mission — a joint effort involving NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency — launched in 1997 and arrived in the
Saturn system in 2004. The Cassini mothership delivered a lander called Huygens
to Titan's surface in early 2005, then continued studying the ringed planet and
its many moons.

Cassini
will keep exploring for another year, then end its mission with an intentional
death dive into Saturn's thick atmosphere in September 2017. This maneuver
should ensure that the probe does not contaminate Titan and the icy Saturn moon
Egeladus — both of which may be capable of supporting life — with Earth
microbes, NASA officials have said.

AWAKENING FOR ALL!!!

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